~ The Incorrigible Market Monetarist

Tucker Carlson’s supposedly anticapitalistic vitriol

I picked up an article on Vox today that contains a discussion of Tucker Carlson’s supposedly anticapitalistic rant delivered on his show some time last week. The author of the article, by all appearance, couldn’t giddier that Tucker has finally seen the light and agrees with her.

Naturally, I was somewhat was curious about what Carlson, a Fox News talk show host, really said. So, I followed the link to have a look for myself. And I think there’s a misunderstanding here because Carlson framed his monologue as a rebuttal to an op-ed published by Mitt Romney that attacked President Trump’s character, and it was more or less the typical sort of complaint I used to hear often when lumped with my more socially conservative friends, it’s more about social structure and family support than it is about economics, and more about political corruption and elitists, like Mitt Romney, sapping working people than anything else. At least that is how I understood it.

Of course, understanding what Carlson said is entirely different than agreeing with it. I agreed with somethings, like about hedge fund looters, and left the rest on the table because I am not particularly sure that he really knows what he’s talking about or what he wants. It’s is something to rant about this stuff stinking to high heaven, which there is no doubt, but to stop there isn’t constructive. Obviously, if the status quo is upended, it must be replaced with something. What that something would be is a point on which Carlson is silent, and there are other things to replace it with that smell much worse than the current odor.

There is one thing Carlson said about libertarians, something about free market worship making everyone miserable, and we need to cut it out because markets are a thing, and don’t solve any problems; and I would challenge Carlson to point out a free market here large enough to be of any consequence, just one. He can’t. They don’t exist. Government built and diligently watches over the banking system. Government gets the trade deals. Government “regulates” equities, and all manners of financial instruments. One cannot spend large amounts of their own money without the government knowing about it. The latest free market to emerge, as in cryptos, governments around the world stealthily moved to squash like a bug. If he wishes to lay blame on something, he should try blaming something other than subtly deceptive scapegoating of unicorns. I’ll give him a hint – it starts with Sarbanes-Oxley.

Quotable Quotes

"The desire is there to do something about difficult problems, but because it is difficult to do something which would help solve them, people do something else instead." -- Dr. Madsen Pirie, Adam Smith Institute